SPEAKER_00: Okay, everybody, we have a great show for a Tuesday for you. We do. We were all waiting to see what Jack Dorsey was going to have to say about Twitter sale to Elon Musk. And he had some after dark thoughts and we break them down.

SPEAKER_03: We love Jack after dark. And then we're going to talk about the range of emotions from Twitter employees. Yeah.

SPEAKER_04: And, you know, some users as well. Then finally, we're going to change the topic. We're talking about an NFT project where what could go wrong? Dr. Influencers on Tik Tok are selling access to medical advice. We live in the nightmare.

SPEAKER_03: Okay.

SPEAKER_05: And finally, there was a Financial Times story about Hoppins fundraising. It's a company that went from $250 million valuation up to $8 billion in under two years. The founder sold almost $200 million in shares in secondary. And is this company as bad as the Financial Times is making it out to be? They did a layoff.

SPEAKER_06: We actually do the math and the answer might, in fact, surprise you about Hoppin.

SPEAKER_09: You are going to want to stay tuned and stay tuned all week because there are some big earnings calls coming up this week.

SPEAKER_04: We got Google and Microsoft later today as we're taping this Meta and Spotify on Wednesday, Apple and Amazon on Thursday.

SPEAKER_11: It's going to be a great week. It's going to be a great show. So stick with us. Stick with us for the whole week. Stick with us. Don't go anywhere.

SPEAKER_13: Stick with us. Don't go anywhere. Don't touch that tile. Don't touch that tile.

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SPEAKER_16: Hey everybody, welcome to Tuesday. It's Tuesday, Tuesday, Tuesday after a big Monday. My God, Molly, what are we going to talk about today?

SPEAKER_18: What could be in the news today on a Tuesday? If only there were something to talk about.

SPEAKER_20: If only. Okay, here's what happened. The moment everyone was waiting for happened yesterday. Yes. What is Jack going to say? All right. What is Jack going to say? The deal is done is, was it a conspiracy? Did Jack help like make this happen? And then he tweeted his full thoughts on the matter and Jack after dark TM Jason Calaganis. Yes. I love Jack after dark. His full thoughts last night in a thread.

SPEAKER_02: Let me hear him.

SPEAKER_20: That started with a link to radio heads. Everything is in its right place.

SPEAKER_24: In case you thought this was not going to go in the totally most unbearably pretentious direction. You were mistaken. Okay. Everything in its right place is how this started.

Jason Calacanis: I like that.

SPEAKER_27: I like it. He, he started with a theme. He's setting a mood. It's a mood. Oh, it's a mood.

SPEAKER_00: Radio head is a mood. And then he goes on to tweet. I love Twitter.

SPEAKER_30: Twitter is the closest thing we have to a global consciousness.

SPEAKER_31: Agree. Agree. I agree with that statement. I agree with that statement. Oh, okay. I mean, I guess. Okay.

SPEAKER_34: I mean, everybody important in the world. It's 300 million people. Yes. And it's a global climate.

SPEAKER_36: I mean, this is like Jack after dark. I like it. I'm here for it. The idea.

SPEAKER_37: I mean, I did have five milligram edible before we started the show, but I'm here for it. There you go. He's feeling it. He's feeling it.

SPEAKER_38: The idea and service is all that matters to me. And I will do whatever it takes to protect both. Twitter as a company has always been my sole issue and my biggest regret. Okay. Honest.

SPEAKER_24: It has been owned by Wall Street and the ad model. Taking it back from Wall Street is the correct first step. So, confirming effectively everything that you and we have said about the problems with trying to operate Twitter as a public company.

SPEAKER_44: I love Jack. I love Jack. When Jack was starting that company, I was at the Allen and company conference. And I said, if you ever need a board member, I think this is going to be the biggest thing

SPEAKER_46: ever. We were just like going for a walk. And, you know, between like conferences or whatever. And, uh, this is the Allen company, like smaller conference, um, which they're pretty discreet about, which was like for like up and comers, not the big one.

SPEAKER_44: And, uh, I was like, you know, if you ever need, uh, this is when they were just hatching the idea, so to speak, um, but I do think he's right that wall street, um, for this company

SPEAKER_49: has been very difficult. And the reason is they, the public comp of Facebook and, you know, and trying to keep up with that, which is like Yahoo trying to keep up with Google. And it makes you do unnatural things when you have shareholders who made a bet on both companies and they're like, this one is not growing like this one. So how does this one grow like that one? And that just sent them into like, like Yahoo, a tailspin, like Yahoo had a lot of promise. They should have leaned into content and services. They could have been a collection of brands or was like a couple of different ways to go.

SPEAKER_05: Going all in on video since they lost search would have been a great move. That's what I advocated for just go all in on video.

SPEAKER_53: Well, see, that's where like, yes, go all in on something like a hundred percent willing

SPEAKER_20: to let Jack off the hook for the lack of innovation for a long time. Like, yeah, you, maybe you need to show growth and need to do this, but there was, there is

SPEAKER_22: a lot of space to innovate when you're a CEO and he had two jobs. He, that was, that was a challenge. And also there was the musical chairs.

SPEAKER_55: You had Ev, Jack, Ev, Dick Costolo. Yeah. Jack, Ev, whatever, um, or Jack and any one of them could have innovated.

SPEAKER_49: Well, and it's hard when you've got, when you have public investors saying, this is the

SPEAKER_44: north star metric, DAOs, mouse, daily active users, monthly active users, ad revenue, whatever.

SPEAKER_05: And, and they were just not able to do what Facebook was doing. And so they, every, there was never enough time to execute. And this is why sometimes a company that's kind of lost, like they should be private, because it might take two years to clean it up. You might have to lay off half the company. You may have to shut down four or five things that are pretty good, uh, but not great. Right.

SPEAKER_49: Cause you can't boil the ocean and you need to have one thing that is growing in order to

Jason Calacanis: be a public company, but he maybe could have laid off half of the people at any time.

SPEAKER_20: He maybe could have said, we're doing a massive restructuring. Like I, I just think board would have to approve it.

SPEAKER_04: That's the problem. You're never, you Jason are never gonna have a power struggle at your company. Cause you're in charge of your company. Yes.

Jason Calacanis: If you have a power struggle at your company, you need to look in the mirror a little bit.

Chamath Palihapitiya: Well, they did set this thing up with out founder authority.

SPEAKER_05: Cause there were two founders, uh, biz asked to be a founder and like they gave him that, but really it was Jack and Ev.

SPEAKER_46: I mean, but maybe I'll give bet biz credit for that. Um, you know, he was there for the beginning. Yeah. I think it's fair to give him credit.

SPEAKER_05: Um, but really Jack created it, Ev created the company biz, you know, operated the company with them. So those are three co-founders, you know, they, they didn't have enough ownership. Each, they lost control of the company, the board got really big.

SPEAKER_03: And then you had this Facebook thing. So. And nobody was a Frank Slootman.

SPEAKER_20: Nobody was a Mark Zuckerberg, even a Cheryl. There was no general. There was no general. And I just think it, it is very easy now to sort of lionize everything that Jack has done. But the fact is like this happened under his watch. This decay started there. Yeah.

SPEAKER_76: And also remember first time CEO. Jack was a first time CEO. Yeah. First public company. Like, you know, listen, when this thing was created, we were all kids, you know, uh, 30 years old or something.

Jason Calacanis: And I could have done it, but I am saying nobody would take my company away from me and I wouldn't sit there and have another job and let it goof off and then sit here and be like, this was never my fault.

SPEAKER_76: Well, I mean, I'm, I'm not saying it's his fault. He's, he is taking ownership there. Isn't he? Like he says, like, this is my big regret.

SPEAKER_70: So then he says, this is my big regret, but not like I ever tried this to change it.

SPEAKER_82: Well, we don't know. Uh, you know, we don't know what happened on the board.

SPEAKER_76: So towards the company has always been my sole issue. Like, I think he's referring to like the company of it, not the product. Like it should never have been a company and my biggest regret.

SPEAKER_85: Well, I mean, he does believe that the internet model is pro is also challenging. I mean, we've all super distorting.

SPEAKER_49: It's super distorting for the New York times. Yep. For CNN, for Fox and for Twitter and for Facebook. Yep.

SPEAKER_46: When you are, are advertising based, um, and you're trying to grow. If you're advertising based and you're not trying to grow or you don't care about growth all that much, it's not that big of a deal. It's when you're a public company and you need to grow 30% year over year in your advertising base, unnatural things can occur. Yes.

SPEAKER_20: And that's, I think the challenge and that specific business model. Is super distorting. Like I will a hundred percent give him that. I'm just going to push back on the idea that he like was doing everything perfectly.

SPEAKER_91: And I don't think, I don't think Twitter was far from perfect.

SPEAKER_44: I think everybody who ran it, um, could have done better.

SPEAKER_05: Yeah. All, all three potential CEOs probably have a lot of regrets. Yeah. Um, and, you know, he's sort of saying that, but anyway, let's continue. What else? So he goes on. Yes.

SPEAKER_24: He goes on to say in principle, I don't believe anyone should own or run Twitter.

SPEAKER_70: It wants to be a public good at a protocol level, not a company.

SPEAKER_101: Okay.

SPEAKER_43: That is explosive. Um, and a real thought bomb. You know, what he's saying there is like, this should be like HTTP, the web.

SPEAKER_103: It should be like SMTP. It should be like, right.

SPEAKER_105: It should be like URLs, but like it's the, or like,

SPEAKER_76: When I say SMTP that that's map, that's email. When I say that's the web. Um, you know, basic RSS is syndication, like blogs, uh, and podcasts. So he's right that it, and in the early days of Twitter, they did support RSS feeds. You could subscribe to Jack's RSS feed. Yeah. Um, and they, I believe deprecated that. And so if it was an open platform and you owned your profile, I own twitter.com slash Jason,

SPEAKER_49: you own slash Molly wood, and they couldn't turn you off and you could publish to your own location. And then the Twitter client would pull in that data.

SPEAKER_76: So if Alex Jones wants to publish his blog and his craziness, it wouldn't be Twitter. That would be publishing. He would be publishing his feed somewhere, and then all the feeds would be pulled together. Like an email client does, whether it's superhuman, Gmail, Microsoft Outlook, or a browser.

SPEAKER_20: I mean, that's just, it's describing the web. It's describing blogs that were aggregated via RSS or by search engines.

Jason Calacanis: It's weirdly, it's describing Yahoo, like he's sort of, but at some point that middle layer always becomes a company, which is how it gets distorted, I guess.

SPEAKER_24: Anyway, he says, okay, solving for the problem of it being a company. However, Elon is the singular solution. I trust.

SPEAKER_04: I trust his mission to extend the light of consciousness.

SPEAKER_46: So, um, you know, Elon has always said, like, part of like being multi-planetary is like, you know, the light of consciousness and oh, okay, this is an Elon phrase that is the light of consciousness, Elon phrase.

SPEAKER_49: Um, and I think also a Sam Harris phrase and, you know, we're all friends and buddies and, you know, I've, I've heard Elon talk for many, many times about like, we've had long, deep conversations, uh, my friend circle about what, what would end humanity if it did end, you know,

SPEAKER_76: in pandemic, nuclear war, uh, or, you know, mine was always like some random object hitting the earth because that happened before. Yeah. It was likely to happen again.

SPEAKER_49: I mean, the sun also having like some solar flare. So I've had these conversations with many of my friends over time, Larry and, and, and Sergei, I've had this conversation with, it's always been like a 15, 20 years ago conversation

SPEAKER_76: that, you know, a lot of people like to have, which was, Hey, if humanity were to end, what would we do and how would we prevent that?

SPEAKER_49: And being on another planet is the ultimate way to back up. And in fact, people don't know this, but the SpaceX project, Elon's first idea was, uh, and the reason he was looking at Russian rocket ships was to back up the biosphere.

SPEAKER_46: And I don't know if anybody knows this or if it's in any of the biographies, I've never read

SPEAKER_120: any of the unauthorized biographies, but he was thinking about taking every biological

SPEAKER_49: thing on the planet, plants, seeds, et cetera, and then putting them into a space station that would circle the earth or the moon or putting them on the moon, some concept like that. And that's when he and Adeo were in Russia, looking at missiles and seeing if they could

SPEAKER_46: rent one to put this thing up in space. And then that's when Elon was like, wait a second, why don't I just make the rockets

SPEAKER_03: myself? Right. Um, and that's, but it was an arc project originally. It was an, yeah, I don't know what arc means, but, uh, Noah's arc, you know,

SPEAKER_49: Oh, no, no, yes, it's exactly what it was. And there's actually a movie called silent from running, which, uh, somebody will pull up the trailer with, and we'll play a little bit with the sound off.

SPEAKER_46: So we don't have a strike against us. But that one had like the original R2 D2 in it, Bruce Dern. And it's like, I think it was 73. It came out and Star Wars came out in 77. So George Lucas kind of cribbed a little bit from this.

SPEAKER_126: And they both cribbed it from a French comic book, um, which had like a lot of these star Wars themes in it, um, which you can look up online. The inspirations for star Wars came from silent running and some other 2001 space odyssey. So anyway, that's the light of consciousness concept.

SPEAKER_130: Got it. Here's silent running.

Jason Calacanis: I recommend now. I, I mean, I have to see this. My son's in a big, like film school phase right now too. So we're going to watch this together. Yeah. This is amazing.

SPEAKER_126: There is the biosphere, uh, silent running. Yeah. And, uh, there's like, does it remind you of star Wars a bit? Yes. And so there it is. These are, um, and there's Bruce Dern, who is supposed to maintain this biosphere. Um, and, uh, at some point they may show the robot that, uh, anyway, somebody can pull up the little robot he interacts with, uh, like a picture of it. You'll find it, but it's a really cool movie.

SPEAKER_81: Um, it's got a lot of really interesting science fiction ideas. That's amazing.

SPEAKER_134: Yeah. Octavia Butler, uh, she's got these books called the parable of the sower. It's a trilogy. Oh, there it is. Science fiction.

SPEAKER_137: That little robot. That's the little robot. That's totally, it's totally R2D2. Yeah.

SPEAKER_140: He interacts, he plays cards with, he talks to, it's literally R2D2 before R2D2.

David Friedberg: Okay. We have some exciting news for you right now. We're going to give one twist listener a thousand dollars in Squarespace credits. How generous you ever go to a company's website and it looks absolutely gorgeous.

SPEAKER_49: Well, we want to show off the best web designers for our listeners and it can be anything, an amazing landing page, a feature flow, a design aesthetic, or anything that would wow potential users. Well, we want to show off the best web design from our listeners. Here's how you can apply. It's really simple. Head to show us your space.com. That's going to redirect you to a tweet from me, the at Jason account. You'll reply to my tweet with a short video image, link, gift, or anything that shows off your space. Then my team and I will feature the best submissions on this week in startups, and we'll pick a winner and give them a thousand dollars Squarespace gift card. Now, your product doesn't need to be built on Squarespace, but let's just say that's going to help because it's such a gorgeous platform. Obviously we're big fans of Squarespace over here, they have been partners with the show

SPEAKER_143: for the last decade. And of course, you can get 10% off at squarespace.com slash twist, squarespace.com slash twist.

SPEAKER_20: She talks about how we have to become a planet, a multi planetary species.

Jason Calacanis: Otherwise we will be, and this quote has like rung with me forever. Smooth skinned dinosaurs. Hmm.

SPEAKER_134: Cause yep.

SPEAKER_98: It's a possibility. So anyway, so moving on.

SPEAKER_44: I think, um, yeah, Jack is saying like Elon's a great steward of the brand, I think not, I think it being private will allow them to clean up a lot of these issues.

SPEAKER_46: And, you know, uh, I think that's a good segue into maybe the employee's reaction.

SPEAKER_20: And he says, I will say one last thing I thought was very interesting is that he, um, Jack went

Jason Calacanis: on to say that Elon and Parag share the same goal of creating a maximally trusted and broadly inclusive platform.

SPEAKER_24: And he's, he writes, thank you both for getting the company out of an impossible situation.

SPEAKER_00: Okay. So there's a conspiracy theory. I guess we all totally agree though, that it was an impossible situation also. Yeah.

SPEAKER_153: Well, if you have a board of directors that owns like, I don't know what the total they

SPEAKER_05: owned, but it was like 0.001%. They were like this professional elite class of people stewarding this with no ownership. We talked about that. It's like a weird thing. And then you have all these people who own whatever one to 10% who don't have board seats. It's like, this really isn't representing the shareholder class.

SPEAKER_49: It's representing what? Like a bunch of intellectual folks who get a lot of power, you know, joy, whatever, whatever,

SPEAKER_44: non-financial motivations they get out of being on the board, a cynical person would say power.

SPEAKER_49: And, you know, a generous person might say, you know, doing what's in the public interest for this platform, right? And could be some combination of those things. Humans are complex. You guy, I might want to be on the board of Twitter for the status of it. Sure. We're status seeking animals. It might also be intellectually curious. And you might have, you know, a specific agenda, like you believe in free speech, or you

SPEAKER_76: believe in, you know, getting rid of online harassment or having great conversations, whatever it is, or making political change in the world. You could have multiple things, but it's just not going to result in a great company or product.

SPEAKER_49: It's going to result in a company going sideways.

SPEAKER_43: So the good news is during this last decade, Twitter didn't die. Twitter could have died during this whole thing. Absolutely.

SPEAKER_129: Yeah, that was a distinct possibility.

SPEAKER_24: Had it not been, I think for the Trump presidency and Trump himself. Yeah. Twitter probably would have.

SPEAKER_00: I mean, it was in a pretty moribund state. The Trump bump was real. Trump bump was very real. For Twitter, without a doubt. It'd be, that's when I.

SPEAKER_03: And for the New York Times and MSNBC and for Fox.

SPEAKER_05: Absolutely.

SPEAKER_44: And that was, I mean, if you look at CNN's, I was trying to find a historical chart of CNN's ratings. When you see their ratings during like impeachment hearings.

SPEAKER_05: And I mean, that's when Rachel Maddow, Anderson and Fox just, but really the, the left side,

SPEAKER_46: because we were all so like, oh my God, this presidency is the craziest thing ever. Yep.

SPEAKER_05: Um, like, is this guy going to be impeached? Is he, you know, controlled by the Russians? I mean, it was just, and he was creating so much chaos. Mm-hmm. You couldn't help but look, because we've never had a president act insane.

SPEAKER_49: I mean, there's no other way to say it. I mean, he was acting insane. And you're like, is this the real world? Because this feels like some side of dystopian sci-fi comedy that the president would act. It was like idiocracy or something.

SPEAKER_162: It really was.

SPEAKER_20: Yep. And it was the biggest story. I mean, the less you think that the media would like things to be boring. No, no, no, no. You are dead wrong.

SPEAKER_24: There are plenty of people at all of those outfits out who are just praying that Trump's account is reinstated on Twitter.

SPEAKER_134: Just praying for it.

SPEAKER_163: Yes.

SPEAKER_134: Like, I'm not trying to be painfully cynical on a Tuesday, but like.

SPEAKER_164: Well, I mean, yes, he was entertaining on the platform.

Jason Calacanis: Um, you can't radicalize an opposition to nothing.

SPEAKER_166: You gotta have something on the other side or else it's just not a fun game.

SPEAKER_165: I've heard many people on the left say it would be really great if Trump got reinstated

SPEAKER_76: right now because it would, it would enhance turnout for this midterm election could be. And they're saying Democrats aren't going to come out because that's always how it is. When you win, you get complacent. When you lose, you get charged up and that the right. And listen, I'm no expert on this, but that does seem to trend.

SPEAKER_126: Correct. If Trump was here acting crazy, we were like, oh my God, I don't want that guy back. I better vote if you're on that. If you're, you know, anti-Trump. So that doesn't make sense. It is direction correct, but let's go to the employees.

SPEAKER_49: Let's do that. Let's go to the employees because I'll give the caveat here that there are 8,000 employees

SPEAKER_44: and thousands of contractors, I believe. So I think the actual real number of people working at on Twitter is over 10,000.

SPEAKER_05: So if you were to sample them, you could, depending on how you, you know, dip your bucket into that sample, it could go either way because there's a lot of different feelings here.

SPEAKER_169: But what was the best representation that we found here on the pod for how employees are feeling?

Chamath Palihapitiya: So with that obvious disclaimer, right? With that obvious disclaimer that we don't know.

SPEAKER_05: Just like Glassdoor can be shaped. Wikipedia can be shaped. The press could shape, you know, how this looks based on who they talk to.

Jason Calacanis: Exactly. It initially it did seem like it was one giant freak out over at Twitter and on Twitter,

SPEAKER_24: by the way. I mean, the number of people just declaring that they had to leave now and like giving tearful goodbyes

SPEAKER_73: and mourning their time on the platform was just a little bit.

SPEAKER_24: Are you talking about users or employees? I'm talking about users now. And then I think some of them were employees too. So one New York Times reporter, Talman Joseph Smith, his thread went viral because he said it is absolutely insane at Twitter right now in the virtual valves of private Slack rooms and employee group techs. I feel like I'm going to throw up. I really don't want to work for a company that's owned by Elon Musk. One other source said, I don't really know what I'm supposed to do. Oh, my God. I hate him. Why does he even want this? And then platformer Casey Newton wrote in a more sort of balanced approach that, yes, as a group, Twitter employees did seem to be negative about the acquisition. But when he started talking to employees one on one, he would find that responses were, quote, more tempered. He wrote some employees I've spoken with are open to the idea that a private Twitter run by Musk stands a better chance of improving the service than would a public company beholden to its shareholders. They like the fact that he wants to eliminate harmful bots and bring more clarity to how recommendation algorithms work.

SPEAKER_134: Almost as though, in fact, these Twitter employees are acting just like, you know, everybody else like people.

SPEAKER_05: Yeah, like, uh, so my read on this would be if you are publicly. Um, now again, this was a New York Times person, you know, quoting Slack stuff. You're going to have a range of people who are going to be inspired by the change here. And you're also going to have change is scary. And this is a huge one.

SPEAKER_49: It's a big change because they have stock options. And so if you just to have empathy here for the person who's been working there for three years, they invested 75% of their shares, they have a strike price of $47. Okay, do I get my shares? Do I get $54? Do I keep my shares? And then we're going to go public again in four years and I have to wait another five years. So what's that? Are these RSUs? My understanding is people were calling Charles Schwab. I read in one story and just trying to get some clarity. So when it's your kids, you know, uh, college tuition or inheritance or your mortgage payments.

SPEAKER_76: Yeah, I mean, this is going to be scary for some people.

SPEAKER_03: Also, it's their livelihood. Also, they're vested. Also, Elon did, as our producer's note, make kind of a joke about firing everybody.

SPEAKER_44: Uh, yes. And I think the, the very difficult thing they were talking about with whoever would take over

SPEAKER_05: Twitter during a new numerous, um, uh, numerous times when they were looking for new leadership, the question was who is going to be willing to make cuts because the company could run with probably 2000 people, like 75% less people.

SPEAKER_49: And almost universally when you make deep cuts like this, the organization functions better because who do you cut?

SPEAKER_76: Well, the truth is when these cuts happen and people won't say this publicly because they want to be gracious about it.

SPEAKER_49: You cut the weakest people in the organization. You obviously wouldn't cut the high performers. So you go to the managers and you're like, you've got a team of 10, you get to keep six.

SPEAKER_76: Which four are you cutting? And so like a basketball team, you'd be like, well, Steph Curry stays, Draymond stays, Clay stays. We know those three are safe. Okay.

SPEAKER_187: Now who's in between.

SPEAKER_20: But I guarantee your bench is not Wiggins and Gary Payton, you know, they're like, it's not, you're gonna have to make hard decisions. Your bench is probably not that good. And, or you're gonna have to make hard decisions.

SPEAKER_80: It could be developing players. They could just not be as great as the and mature as the players who are at the top. Right. Maybe they're fine. Yeah. We have no idea. We have no idea.

SPEAKER_24: And so we don't know that they failed to tackle these problems. We only know the incentives probably told them not to like, maybe there are plenty of engineers there who are totally capable of turning off the spam.

SPEAKER_76: They, there was probably some hand wringing, uh, and lack of leadership as to what the goal is that that will be gone in a private company. Yeah. Because the private company, when it's owned by one person, you have founder authority.

SPEAKER_49: And just like Steve Jobs said, you know what, we're going with the phone first, then we're doing the tablet. And his team had said, well, we should, the tablets, well, you know, works and look how beautiful it is. It's like, it's not responsive enough. Let's iterate a couple of times on the batteries and the touch screen on a smaller screen.

SPEAKER_76: And then we'll get to the tablet later.

SPEAKER_192: Like, oh, Bill Gates has got a tablet out. Now we should compete.

SPEAKER_49: You know, it's like, nope, we're going to go after the phone. Chase, chase, chase. You have to make some bold decisions, right? Yeah, absolutely.

SPEAKER_05: Uh, and this is, uh, Cybertruck's a bold decision. Cybertruck also has, I, I, I don't know what the reservations are now for Cybertruck, but it was bonkers how many Cybertruck reservations there were.

SPEAKER_49: And the Cybertruck does not look like a pickup truck. They didn't go the Rivian route. And they're like, let's make something that looks like a F-150. That's founder authority. You cannot make a bold choice like that in a committee with a board that owns .001% collectively.

SPEAKER_120: That's a decision that the God queen or God king can make. Yeah. They could say, you know what? We're going to go for it. We're going to do something crazy here.

SPEAKER_137: Again, I don't know what the reservations are for Rivian versus

SPEAKER_49: Cybertruck right now. I think that like kind of shows what founder authority can do because that odd looking truck is inspired people, probably most of which are buying their first truck to jump on board. And they didn't go after just the truck owners. They went after, Hey, maybe you own, you know, I don't know, an SUV.

SPEAKER_192: And this, you want this rad Cybertruck that looks like nothing else on the road. Yeah.

SPEAKER_20: Well, and I don't know that you get a Ford F-150 Lightning without Cybertruck, like the existence itself spurs change.

SPEAKER_24: So once you make this big, bold bet, you cause a whole cascade of change as a result of it.

SPEAKER_199: I'm going to quickly explain one crucial type of insurance that all startups need. It's DNO insurance. You've heard of this before. You might not know what it is. This is directors and officers insurance. And it helps if somebody does something dumb and you get sued. I don't know how to tell you more plainly, or maybe you didn't do something dumb. And some dumb person decides to sue you for a dumb reason. I have seen this. I've seen all flavors of it. You need to have DNO. It's just part of growing up as a startup. And if you don't have business insurance, well, you're going to have failed one of the first steps of being a founder. The best place to look for it is in broker and brokers technology is going to save you time. It's going to save you money. Prices are up to 20% lower and you get better coverage than the incumbents. You can go from sign up to quote and purchase in just 10 minutes. When you work with in broker, instead of all those slow incumbents, you're not dealing with those giant lumbering large companies. Sign up takes days, not weeks. And the process is transparent. There is no opaque pricing. So to instantly buy custom built insurance for startups, go to in broker.com slash twist. While you're there, you're going to get an extra 10% off by using the code twist. Easy to remember this week in startups. T W I S T go to in broker. E M B R O K E R.com slash twist and use that offer code T W I S T.

SPEAKER_24: Some interesting breaking news related to Twitter employees. Twitter has locked down any changes to the platform. Now this isn't unusual. Of course you would freeze like product. Probably like rollouts in advance of a new owner. However, they will not allow any product updates unless they're business critical. Uh, and evidently according to these anonymous sources, talking to Bloomberg, Twitter imposed the temporary ban to keep employees who may be miffed about the deal from quote going rogue.

SPEAKER_05: Oh, oh, that's, um, fascinating. I could see somebody doing that. If you did that as an employee, you would be responsible legally, financially, and career-wise that I'm just, for the record, like probably not a great idea.

SPEAKER_44: Like Chelsea Manning, you know, did something like with, uh, as a conscientious objector in

SPEAKER_126: terms of making stuff and paid a massive price. Her, her freedom. I think that she goes by her now, not they, correct me if I'm wrong.

SPEAKER_209: I'm sorry. I don't have the pronouns.

SPEAKER_169: Oh, I think so. Yeah. I'm pretty sure she's, she's a she, um, not a they, but somebody can correct me if apologize

SPEAKER_120: if I, if I, if I'm not up to date on it, but she, uh, was a he at the time. She, uh, made a really serious decision to leak that information and went to jail. Yeah. For close to a decade.

SPEAKER_45: And I, if you just, please, if you're thinking about doing this, think about the ramifications of going to jail. Don't do it.

SPEAKER_22: Could you imagine somebody at Twitter? Just, I mean, people have done this kind of stuff.

SPEAKER_71: I know totally, you know, like, and it could wind up ruining your life. Yeah.

SPEAKER_22: Like literally your freedom could be at stake. I mean, it's, it's almost for their own protection that they,

SPEAKER_218: I mean, the, the, the obvious thing to do would be to turn off Elon's account or

SPEAKER_05: something, you know, like, but, and this kind of childishness is cyber crime. And I'll tell you something, the, the three letter agencies are, they got a real chip on

SPEAKER_49: their shoulder about cyber stuff and they are, they've made the point over and over again, rest in peace, Aaron Schwartz being the, the ultimate example of it. You know, they, they will take it to the mat to a level that is, you know, some people might

SPEAKER_76: consider deranged when cyber crime occurs, um, you know, and, and people who burn a building down, make it five years in jail and people who, you know, do cyber crime, they'll look at it and

SPEAKER_49: say, well, the building would cost $5 million, but the harm here was $50 million. So it should be 10 times as much. Mm hmm. So people feel like digital crime is the, the thinking is like something you could roll back easily and digital crime is not that big of a deal. It turns out the feds actually take it more seriously.

SPEAKER_224: It seems on all accounts. So please don't do something like that for your own. That would be a really dumb thing to do. That would be a really dumb thing to do. Yeah.

SPEAKER_20: But I mean, it's just, it's fascinating to me. I mean, I feel like you never know what to think about this kind of reporting. Like on the one hand, it would be 100%. I would think standard operating procedure to lock the platform. Sure. Of course when a new owner is coming in, that doesn't even sound that like weird, but you do, but then it's a great click baiting story. Let's be honest. It's a great, right.

SPEAKER_188: It's a great click baiting quote. Like nobody's going to go rogue. Come on.

Chamath Palihapitiya: Yes. I mean, they're almost incentivizing people to go rogue by being like, Hey, here's what you could do. Like give them the idea. Exactly.

SPEAKER_45: It's a little inception here.

SPEAKER_05: Like, and we're here to unwrap, unwind that for you. Yeah. Young people don't ever do something stupid like this.

SPEAKER_44: If you want to do something stupid, like get your friends to bring a mariachi band and like storm out of the building playing, like having a marching band.

SPEAKER_49: I quit and then march out with the marching band. Like those people are doing on Tik Tok. So it's like stunt. Resignations.

SPEAKER_27: Yeah. Now I don't know if I would hire somebody who did a stunt resignation. I might do it just for the LOLs. Depends. Depends. Depends.

SPEAKER_233: If you're in marketing, I might actually do a, I might actually appreciate if you're in the marketing department doing a gorilla stunt. I mean, it would depend on the circumstances. If your boss was a true jerk. I know. And you went out with a marching band. Respect, but maybe, maybe respect.

SPEAKER_235: You got a brand now. You got a brand. Yeah, maybe.

SPEAKER_04: Yeah. Before we move on to other fun tech stories.

SPEAKER_24: I mean, we'll all get our last thoughts in, but I did think to myself watching the Sturm and Drong and everybody freaking out and all the, you know, the rendering of the faces and I'm going to Canada. Exactly. That it was like, okay, we're all on this platform and it sucks. It makes us feel bad every day. Yes. It is not functional. It does not offer the features that we wanted to offer. Continue. It has only gotten worse in terms of spreading and peddling disinformation and sadness and division.

SPEAKER_200: Amen. Continue. Don't you want to maybe see if the guy can make it better before you lose your ever loving and stomp off like a child?

SPEAKER_49: I'm putting my hands up. Praise Jesus. Like here is a rational assessment of the situation.

SPEAKER_80: The system has been broken for a decade. It hasn't gotten better. We all hate certain aspects of it. Okay.

SPEAKER_165: The guy's coming in. He's executed. Well, he's got a vision. He's been pretty clear and upfront about what it is. Give him a shot. If you don't like a chance, literally, we could all just go over to Instagram. We could all go over to back to blogging.

SPEAKER_80: We could go to Facebook. We can go to LinkedIn. There's a million places we can go. Is it the same? No, it's nuanced different.

SPEAKER_49: But that if Elon were to do and the new management or the existing management, whatever the reconstructed team, however, it gets reconstructed.

SPEAKER_76: I have no insight there. Um, were to do something crazy with the platform. Well, that would just be an opportunity for somebody to create an alternative. Exactly. Just like TikTok created an alternative to Instagram and YouTube created an alternative to,

SPEAKER_164: you know, blogging and other things that came before it. And other video services that came before it.

SPEAKER_247: So a hundred percent optional to be there.

SPEAKER_24: And it's not, it would be hard to make it worse.

SPEAKER_83: So like, maybe just chill out and see what happens.

SPEAKER_05: And I just want to shout out Rachel. I don't want to hear any stunt resignations on, uh, okay. Boomer on Friday. Okay.

SPEAKER_251: I'm not, I'm not in step thing. Like I want Rachel to go do a stunt.

SPEAKER_253: She's like, Oh, I have a plan.

SPEAKER_233: Oh, I got my stunt resignation. Julio. Ordering a band off magic. Fiverr.com. Forget your band.

SPEAKER_262: Use the promo code twist. Promo code twist. Oh my God.

SPEAKER_137: Listen, when you're a founder, it's fun to trade your craziest stories with other founders. Recently, Balloon CEO, Amanda Greenberg, one of my portfolio companies told me how Vanta's

SPEAKER_49: sock two solution helped her save an important deal in the final hours. Yes. Balloon sells SAS products and collaborative software. And when they needed 10 documents in place within 48 hours to close a deal. Well, Vanta saved the day by supplying customizable templates for Amanda to fill out and helping them through the process all the way to close. So if you don't have your sock too tight, you can't close major customers like this. Vanta's compliance software makes it easier to get and renew your sock two. They continually test against technical and non-technical sock two requirements. They partner with over two dozen audit firms who have been trained to file sock two reports directly within Vanta. And on average, Vanta customers are sock two compliant in just two to four weeks. Compare that to three to five months without Vanta. And guess what? Vanta is going to give you $1,000 off right now for your sock two because you listen to this week in startups, get that $1,000 off right now. Vanta.com slash twist.

SPEAKER_199: V-A-N-T-A dot com slash twist. Once again, Vanta.com slash twist for $1,000 off. All right.

SPEAKER_265: Amazing. I love this story.

SPEAKER_00: I think this is a Rachel story. Oh, this is a Molly story. This is a Molly story. I like got obsessed with this in the morning when I was looking for any other news. Yes.

SPEAKER_267: And so anyway, I would say to the team for making this into an incredible story. Look at all this right up. Okay.

SPEAKER_164: But let me just say for the, for the employees over at Twitter, great opportunity. I have met countless people over the decades who work for Elon. They uniformly report they did their best work and one of the most inspired working at SpaceX, Tesla, Neuralink, Boring. I've met countless people who've worked with him. I know him.

SPEAKER_80: It's an inspiring person. I've watched him work. He's an inspiring leader. He gets done. He's focused. He sets incredible goals. It's all about the work.

SPEAKER_165: Now, if you're on vacation and you're, it's kind of like a dope gig where you're getting paid six figures to off. Yeah.

SPEAKER_49: You probably should polish off your resume and go to who hodl. Hootl. What was he at? What did they call it in Silicon Valley? What do they call it? Google. Oh, they had a neighborhood. Hooli. Hooli. Go hodl at Hooli.

SPEAKER_80: Go hodl your Bitcoin and your Doge at Hooli. And show title. And show title. Hodl at Hooli. That's a better place. I mean, Google appreciates people not doing work. Yeah. They love that. You cannot imagine. They love taking talent off the market and putting them on the roof and letting them rest invest.

SPEAKER_49: You're not going to rest invest at an Elon Musk on Twitter. You're going to do your best work. If you're up for that, then do your best work.

SPEAKER_17: If you're not, highly recommend polishing off your resume and finding another cushy gig somewhere where you're not expected. And you know what?

SPEAKER_44: I personally, that's how you are. Personally, if I was running Twitter and we had that big, beautiful office,

SPEAKER_05: I would do year zero. This is if I was CEO. If magically somebody said, Jake, you want to be CEO of Twitter? If somebody said that to me, like if I knew somebody at Twitter and they said,

SPEAKER_27: you know what? Just like, randomly. I know you were thinking about semi-retirement, but here's the thought.

David Friedberg: And they said, Jake, you know what? You understand Twitter. Why don't you run it? Oh God. If somebody said that, I would come in and I'd say, guess what?

SPEAKER_05: It's year zero. We are going to have this office building filled and this is going to be the locus of power. And this is going to be, you know, a seven day a week operation.

SPEAKER_44: We are going to really crush it and make a big effort in the first year. If you want to be part of that, you know, I'm going to need you to show up.

SPEAKER_49: You know, some people might be remote. Of course, there might be some all stars. But let's all go to this amazing, brilliant office again. And we're going to have an in office culture until we get this thing really dialed in. It doesn't have to be seven days a week. It'd come in two days a week, three days a week. But we're going to start this process of really getting focused and setting some really tight goals. And here are the four goals that we're going to crush this year to show the world,

SPEAKER_57: you know, that we're serious about making change here.

SPEAKER_49: Boom.

SPEAKER_57: I'm not saying I would take the CEO job.

SPEAKER_89: Not saying, not saying, not saying anything.

SPEAKER_280: Not saying anything.

SPEAKER_89: I'm not going to be the CEO of Twitter. Not a yes, not a no. I mean, president, man. I don't know. But anyway, I'm not saying I would do it much.

SPEAKER_285: You know, I'm I'm not saying I wouldn't be qualified.

SPEAKER_216: There could be like a floor for lunch. Like they're not going to need all the employees. So there could be an extra. Plenty.

SPEAKER_44: We have a little area for lunch. I can put that in there. Put a little inside area. I'm not saying I can't multitask. Of course. I mean, they're running two companies now.

SPEAKER_05: Kind of. Yeah. No problem. Easy peasy. All right. Let's go to the next story. We'll go wrap this up here. What else is in the news, Molly?

SPEAKER_00: Well, this news may surprise you.

SPEAKER_24: Let's, uh, let's pull up that headline again, because what happened is that

SPEAKER_04: tick tock famous doctors are getting into NFTs and it's a mess.

SPEAKER_293: I'm sorry.

SPEAKER_36: There are doctors on tick tock. Yeah. Look, there they are. Who want to do an NFT griff. Yeah. Okay.

SPEAKER_294: YouTube.com slash, uh, this week. So if I buy their NFT, I can go get plastic surgery with them.

SPEAKER_71: Is that where this is going? So it, the, it's.

SPEAKER_296: Please tell me I didn't guess it. I don't know what the story is.

SPEAKER_04: This headline makes no sense to me. This headline is absolutely baffling, nor does this business idea basically.

SPEAKER_24: Um, but they did create these NFTs of tick tock doctors. What they were supposed to do in the plainest English that our producers could come up with. The project was called meta doc M E T A doc, you know, and these NFTs were supposed to give

SPEAKER_04: owners access to the doctors involved in the project, like a web three concierge care. Okay. Yeah. Concierge doctor. I got one of those. Yeah, sure. Holders would receive heart tokens for every day that they own the NFT.

SPEAKER_24: And then the tokens could be used for three tiers of doctor experiences, ranging from DMS to ask me anything to tell a doc appointments or video chats. And then of course, if you have one, you also can get discounts on apparel, personal care items, medical tests, supplements, and more. Okay. I'm there. Meta docs founder, Dr. Sina Jurabchi hopes it will evolve into a full fledged virtual clinic in the so-called metaverse where patients can put on a haptic suit and be examined remotely by a physician in virtual reality. Like, I have to be honest. I don't hate that. Right.

Jason Calacanis: So it's a grift. Disrupt doctors.

SPEAKER_04: This is like less a grift and more illegal. Oh, well, okay.

SPEAKER_22: So from the treatment perspective, because there are rules around telemedicine.

SPEAKER_00: Like a lot of rules around doctors and how they can operate and where they can operate. They have to be licensed in each individual state in which they're going to. And country sure.

SPEAKER_24: This is not a licensed telemedicine service. So doctors actually cannot legally use it to treat patients. Okay. If you have ever done an online appointment, actually doctors always call like the teledocs call to ask where you're calling in before the doctor can come on. Doctors are then being removed from the project because they either didn't agree to participate, didn't feel comfortable with telling people they could treat them via NFT when they can't, or because they have not completed their residency. In one case, a doctor had to be removed from the project after he left his hospital position.

Jason Calacanis: So it was actually no longer employed as a doctor. All right.

SPEAKER_44: So there are regulations in place for a reason. And as we've discussed with Theranos over and over again, there are places where you can, you know, you know, move fast and break things, please, Madison, don't do it there. You just have a higher duty and authority there.

SPEAKER_165: So I do like the idea of the NFTs for the fish frying club that we had on the pod, Gary Vaynerchuk's.

SPEAKER_49: Sure thing now or Soho house or we're investors in one for music festivals.

SPEAKER_05: Uh, and so I do think the NFT as a membership club after party, by the way, is the name of the one we invested in. I'm not trying to promote them or anything, but I thought it was an interesting project run by people. I know. Yeah, and they're credible.

SPEAKER_46: We'll have them on the pod at some point. Then we paid 10,000 for our two NFTs and we invested in the company. The two $10,000 NFTs gives us four tickets. Every time they do one of these events, we have eight tickets. I was going to give them to the producers, but nobody wants to go to Vegas for it. Or they couldn't because I'm working them too hard. But theoretically, we could.

SPEAKER_05: It's kind of like buying Coachella tickets. So imagine you wanted to start a music festival instead of trying to raise money. You just make a club and you're like, hey, 1000 people spend $10,000 on these.

SPEAKER_46: We have $10 million. Now we can produce music festival for the next 10 years and spend a million dollars on each. And then we could also sell additional tickets or let you resell or your thousand VIP passes that get you backstage or to the backstage area, whatever. There could be a backstage and another backstage.

SPEAKER_49: You know, it's just a really cool idea. But doing this for doctors, there's too many moving parts. You would have to really be thoughtful about this. If you had 10 doctors who said we're selling these to California residents and it includes

SPEAKER_76: an onboarding and you get, you know, 10 hours of telemedicine a year for the next 10 years.

SPEAKER_49: You really want to define this and make it through. So just be thoughtful. I mean, that's all. It's just about being thoughtful about these things.

SPEAKER_130: Music festival is a different level of, you know, more fried fish is different than this.

SPEAKER_19: NFTs as fly, fly fishing club. Yeah, fly fish, fish and chips. I just, I hear it's all my dyslexia.

SPEAKER_24: Which is awesome. I love fried fried fish. I love, yeah, I'd be down for a fish and chips club. Yeah.

SPEAKER_216: I mean, the idea of NFTs as access plus badge. Great. Fine. You're a seasoned ticket holder.

SPEAKER_24: You get some perks and you have a, you have an asset, a digital asset that serves as your badge of membership and honor and art. Cool. Love it. Don't even hate the idea of trying to apply that model to concierge care. Hmm. Necessarily. Yeah. But if people could die. Yeah. And there are a bunch of laws around how to do this. Yeah. I mean, it's just like, you know what? This is not, it's not ready. It's not ready for us. Not ready.

SPEAKER_44: Well, then also are the NFTs appreciating in value and then based on what? So, you know, when you have a music festival, it's pretty obvious what you would base the valuation of these tickets. Who's performing? How much do you know? What's the market for them? Does the mark, is there market demand?

SPEAKER_05: So if you did, and this turned into, you know, uh, Coachella over time, you could see people would be like a backstage pass. Coachella was a thousand dollars were, you know, a lifetime backstage pass is worth 10,000. Now it can be worth a hundred thousand down the road. Right. Yeah. As it gets bigger and, and bigger names play at it. Um, here, like, would it double in value because the doctor became more sought after? I, I don't know. It just seems weird. Whereas like a popular club like Soho house or fly fish, fly fishing club. Um, the fried fly fishing club, fly guy fishing, whatever it's called is, would be.

SPEAKER_03: I'm starting a competitor called fly guy fishing.

SPEAKER_05: I actually want to start one for poker. I've always wanted to start a private club for playing games like poker and backgammon.

SPEAKER_208: Uh, fly fish club. I apologize. I'm, I'm making fun, but, um, I, I do think that was like sincerely a brilliant idea.

SPEAKER_49: So I would like to start a poker club and I would have my own poker NFT grift. So if there's somebody out there who's passionate about poker and isn't too degenerate and can actually like work, I would hire you to do this for me. Basically. I sell, I could sell a thousand of these. I would sell them for $5,000. Maybe yeah, $10,000 each. And then it would include that would be 10 million bucks. Uh, and we would, um, create a location, which would be a private club where members could play cards in the Bay area. Mm-hmm and then maybe a second one somewhere else. And then, uh, we would have pop up poker games, you know, at, uh, events around the world.

SPEAKER_55: Okay. Don't that's a good name, Nick. Don't say it on air.

SPEAKER_124: Oh yeah, workshop in that name. That's good. That's good. Yeah. That's good.

SPEAKER_02: I was like, I think I would work. Hey, I have people notice in here.

SPEAKER_20: I think NFTs as membership and then NFTs as pure sort of artistic expression. A friend literally sold me on the NFT game at on Easter Sunday.

SPEAKER_24: We were all, we were having brunch and she was talking about, and this is not a person who's like super techie, you know, she's sort of like, I don't really understand all this, but she's an artist and really made the case and is doing a super cool NFT project that I literally cannot wait to see and even buy. Like I was like, I love this. I love what you're creating. It's beautiful. And it has this really meaningful aspect to it. But she was saying that what's so great about it for artists and for all these communities is that it is like, it's like when you could just create a blog and have all the expression you wanted on the internet. She's like, it's like the internet is fun again because there's things you can do as an artist with NFTs, with metadata and instant creation where you can create layers. And then, you know, people put in certain attributes, it'll create a million versions of that and they're all beautiful and they're super customized to you.

SPEAKER_04: She's like, it just as a, as a playground is delightful. And I was like, well, hell now I like it.

SPEAKER_44: I, you know, it's the, it's the, the thing that's beautiful about crypto is this idea that you're empowering people to participate in a more meaningful way in the creation of organizations. That's a very cool idea. Yeah. Um, now there's layers of grift on top of it, professionalism and stupidity, you know,

SPEAKER_49: but the ownership nature of it is what we do with cap tables in technology all the time. So the more people can do that, the more I'm all in on it. I love the idea of more participation. Now, your ownership is really a membership. So keep that in mind. You don't own equity in the thing because we have securities law. And we talked to Brian Armstrong about that on the last all in that, like, there needs to be a framework for projects. And I did the safe harbor one. I think my idea is the best, um, because I've really thought about and talked to a lot of people, which is there should be a tiered safe harbor. So any project under $10 million and under $10,000 maximum investment should be safe harbored. What that means is you can do whatever project you want. You just have to have one person's name. It has to be incorporated. You need to have some basic insurance or something, whatever, just like a basic amount, but you don't have to worry about accreditation or whatever, because the max damage you could do is 10,000 and somebody is in charge of it. And it's incorporated in Delaware or somewhere in the United States. Right now it's between 10 and a hundred million.

SPEAKER_05: You need to have a board of directors and you need to have KYC, uh, and know your customer. Thank you. And you can do anybody with $10,000 max investment is fine. Anybody above 10,000 has to be accredited. So now, okay. Yeah. So somebody who's a truck driver or a teacher could get swindled, but the max they could get swindled out of is $10,000.

SPEAKER_251: It's not going to destroy their life forever. It's, it's a, it's a hole you could dig yourself out of. Don't be playing. Right.

SPEAKER_43: And if it is, you shouldn't be playing because like people do take $10,000 who are truck drivers or teachers and go to Vegas and blow it.

SPEAKER_05: Like, yeah, this, this happens every day in Vegas.

SPEAKER_49: So you're basically saying like, we'll put a cap on it. And then anybody who's running those things is like, great. So if that person does choose to sue me for whatever reason, the max damages is 10.

SPEAKER_289: The average investment at the syndicate.com. And this is of accredited investors about $7,000.

SPEAKER_49: What I love about this in terms of my exposure as the person running the syndicate and you as well, and we have insurance and these are accredited investors. They know what they're doing. There has never been a lawsuit over syndicates. Like there's been zero. I know of one instance where somebody, um, threatened and it was on one of the platforms and it like, there was no case to be had.

SPEAKER_80: So it was just went away, but what's the damage? If the average is $7,000, if somebody really felt like they were damaged in some way,

SPEAKER_49: what is the legal you to spend? $500,000 suing somebody for $7,000. It's just like, you would just suck it up and like, take the loss. Just like somebody who played in a rig poker game and lost $7,000. Might just suck it up and take the loss. So that's really what has to happen with crypto. I also think with private company investing, just half the amount that people can lose. And then they still get to participate, but there's a cap. That's all. It's very simple. Yeah. There's no caps in Vegas, by the way. You can go there and mortgage your whole house and show up and blow it playing roulette in an hour.

SPEAKER_02: One spin. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Um, so anyway, yes, no, no NFTs for healthcare. Not yet. Not ready for that. No NFTs for healthcare.

SPEAKER_289: All right.

SPEAKER_49: One of the things that happened during the pandemic was virtual events.

SPEAKER_05: And one of the companies, perhaps the leading one, was a UK based, uh, platform called Hopin, H-O-P-I-N. I know about this. I, uh, was able, uh, we, we considered using it for the events over at inside.com. When we started doing virtual events and here at, uh, launch, we have remote demo day.

SPEAKER_49: I looked at all these platforms. They were very expensive. If you're doing a free event, probably not a great thing for you to use because they would charge you 50,000 a year or, you know, per person. Uh, and so we went with zoom plus, you know, slack free space, basically close to free solution. That is flat rate for the year. Yep. Anyway, Hopin was very interesting, uh, product and service, but, uh, they got an incredible value, a valuation. Just look at this valuation.

SPEAKER_24: And incredible amounts of, uh, incredible literal dollars too. Like they're, so they're series a, they got up to $7.8 billion.

SPEAKER_200: But look at the ramp up here.

SPEAKER_22: This shows VCs have lost their mind.

SPEAKER_200: Lost their mind.

SPEAKER_04: And apparently again, thought the pandemic would never end. This will be the status quo forever. So they put in $40 million in June of 2020. That's a series. A. June. 2020. At a $244 million. A quarter billion dollar. By December, the series B was $230 million at a one and a half billion dollar valuation.

SPEAKER_152: Six months later, the valuation went 5X.

SPEAKER_224: No, 6X. 6X. Then you get to March. Okay. March. And you got a series C. Of the next year. Of the next year. January, February, March.

SPEAKER_352: But just still a few months later. Four months later. Four months later. Okay. How much did it go up?

SPEAKER_200: $414 million raised at a $5.8 billion dollar valuation. Wait a second. Wait a second.

SPEAKER_22: Wait a second. Valuation goes up $4 billion in four months. A billion dollars a month. They're doing great. It went up a billion dollars a month. Okay.

SPEAKER_205: That's insane. At this point, by the way, A16 is in. They're like FOMO galore.

SPEAKER_130: So what we're saying is the company was a quarter billion dollar company in June and then less than a year later, nine months later, it was worth 6 billion almost. Yeah. So that would be for 22 or 23 X in nine months. Okay. That defies gravity. There's no way that actually makes any sense, but okay, let's continue. No. Because it didn't end.

SPEAKER_24: It keeps going. July of 2021. They raised the series D, which is $460 million at an $8 billion valuation led by Altimeter and

SPEAKER_20: Arena Holdings. So March. Yeah. April, May, June, July, four more months. They go up another $2.2 billion. All right. So growth is slowing at this point. I mean, the valuation is only going up half a billion a month.

SPEAKER_05: We need to know the revenue of this company to really make a judgment call here, but to be worth 8 billion, 8 billion, I would expect, let's see.

SPEAKER_152: You guess because I know the answer. Oh, you do know the answer. Okay. It's in our, it's in our notes, but.

SPEAKER_325: Okay.

SPEAKER_152: Don't you know the actual revenue? I'm not peaking.

SPEAKER_325: So, okay. I, I will tell you what reality would be. Okay.

SPEAKER_120: In an absurdly hot market, a hundred times top line revenue, uh, would be, uh, 8 million would be 800 million. So 80 million would be 8 billion. That would be an absurd peak peak market.

SPEAKER_49: So 80 million would equal that. Now, if it was 50 X, you'd have to have 40 million and no, no, uh, 160 million. Yeah.

SPEAKER_76: Let me just do the quick back of the envelope math here. 160.

SPEAKER_164: Uh, 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3. Uh, yeah. 8, 8 billion. 1, 2, 3. 1, 2, 3. 1, 2, 3. Divided by that.

SPEAKER_76: Yeah. That's 50 times. Yeah. So 1 point 160 million would be 50 times top line. That's what I would put it up.

SPEAKER_20: So you'd think the revenue should be at 160 million a year, a year to get there. Well, in, uh, according to a financial time source, Hopin generated over a hundred million dollars in ARR in 2021, but 30 million or so came from their acquisition of StreamYard, which is a streaming service. Like recently. So likely. So really what it comes down to is likely closer to $70 million ARR. Okay.

SPEAKER_199: So it was trading at a hundred times, which was crazy. Plus valuation makes no sense.

SPEAKER_49: Yeah. And then the question is, are any of those customers who make up that 70 million in revenue? So this obviously had pretty fast revenue. Are any of those customers sticking around post pandemic? And I think some will, uh, because online events I think are not going to go away.

SPEAKER_05: The interesting thing here, the, so anyway, this is absurd peak market, but it was probably growing out of such a fast clip. The crazy thing here, according to the FT research, Hopin CEO, uh, Johnny Bufarat cashed

SPEAKER_06: out a hundred 95 million in secondary securing the bag and a two year old company. Yeah.

SPEAKER_44: This is a fast rant revenue growth for a company of the size, just so we're clear. So, uh, as crazy as this one seems, right.

SPEAKER_05: It's probably two X as crazy as it should be, but it's not.

SPEAKER_71: It's not unheard of.

SPEAKER_00: I mean, they were making money and the revenue was growing really quickly.

SPEAKER_20: However, now you are in a scenario where the CEO sold almost $200 million of his own shares.

SPEAKER_24: And as of two days ago on the financial times, there were sub 500 events listed on the platform, representing a 97% decrease in the number of events lifted listed on Hopin. The company in February laid off about 12% of its staff. Sounds wise. And, uh, they say they have plenty of runway.

SPEAKER_378: Yeah, I think I would think so. I would imagine.

SPEAKER_05: Now the question is, can they ever get back up to this valuation? Because now the company would be worth 30 times revenue.

SPEAKER_06: So in order to be worth 8 billion, 20 times, you probably got to get to three, four, 500 million in revenue to build into that valuation. Again, if they had 500 million in revenue, would they be worth 8 billion as a public company?

SPEAKER_05: Maybe, maybe, maybe they would need to have more. So I think that's, uh, going to be the question. And then also how profitable is the company? Does this have an 80% margin or 50% margin? I don't know the total number of employees. If I did, I might be able to give you, uh, back into their cost structure. So how many employees got laid off? 138 would be 12%. So if you times that by eight, approximately you would get the number of employees.

SPEAKER_212: So if we were to do back of the envelope math, 138, uh, times eight would be 1100 employees, 1100 employees, uh, times an average employee costs of a hundred and put out a hundred thousand.

SPEAKER_44: Who knows what level of employee they have. Um, they are spending 110 million dollars a year.

SPEAKER_05: So they might even be getting close to break even. Um, so laying off 10% of the staff, that 12% of the staff, uh, would actually get them probably,

SPEAKER_381: you know, who knows what they're spending on servers and marketing as well.

SPEAKER_382: So they might be actually within spitting distance of being breakeven. It could be.

SPEAKER_49: And this is why math is important. Cause when I saw altimeter on there, I'm good friends with Brad Gershner. He tends to be very smart and considered. And so that would be my signal to maybe when he did that $8 billion evaluations to think, is this insanity like clubhouse? Cause clubhouse was 4 billion with no revenue. Okay. Well, here's a SAS company, right? And this is why SAS companies are safer bet. Cause there's actual revenue and it's reoccurring. So even if they lost, like for a SAS company to lose 30% of its revenue year over year would be unheard of. It would have to really be some crazy situation like the pandemic ending or like a competitor giving the product away for free. But even then people would have to take the time to cancel a 40 K. I think these, they're probably the average customer.

SPEAKER_76: I don't know. I'm guessing here. Cause I know that we quoted out all of these air meat hop in. We looked at all of them and they were way too expensive. They were quoting us like 50 grand, a hundred grand a year to have like,

SPEAKER_05: you know, up to 3000 people on our events or whatever. And there was just too much usage charges that to make it worth it. So I think there's a model here for somebody to do a flat rate and just undercut all these folks because you could build this with open source chat and open. This is the easiest software in the world to make. You just take zoom. I think zoom will own this business eventually. God bless you. If you did sneeze zoom.

SPEAKER_03: And I don't know why zoom I did.

Jason Calacanis: Thank you. I don't know why zoom doesn't already.

SPEAKER_44: I think zoom is kind of dancing around this. They have the webinars, which is what we pay for.

SPEAKER_05: And I think the webinar product, we can have a couple of thousand people and it costs us like a thousand dollars a year or something. Um, it's really affordable. You don't have, um, multiple stages.

SPEAKER_44: And the calendar around it with, uh, an area for networking and an area for, um, trade shows. And so I really would love to see somebody make a more affordable version of this.

SPEAKER_49: I actually consider it just rolling our own, which I do see some people are doing and,

SPEAKER_05: you know, building wrappers around it. But, uh, yeah, somebody tell me what the zoom says.

SPEAKER_00: I can't see it when you pull up these and webinar 690 a year for up to 500 attendees. And then, and then within events platform 890 a year.

SPEAKER_24: Yeah.

SPEAKER_49: So I think this will be zoom's business. Um, so if zoom could make it, so when you show up for the event, Molly, you have, here are the tracks. And then here's a chat room for each talk. Yep. You know, like, and then here's a trade show area. That's really what you need is the trade show area.

SPEAKER_02: Love, love, love, love hybrid events, right? Keep doing hybrid events. I think there's no, we have one meet our fun.

SPEAKER_49: Dot com, which we're doing a third one of where funds pitch founders and we had like 10,000 people, I know, maybe 8,000 people signed up for it.

SPEAKER_76: And then a lot of people watch the videos after, but you get hundreds of people watching it. I really would like to have more networking space and for the sponsors and stuff like that. So I was looking for a solution. But yes, hybrid is the way to go.

SPEAKER_396: And I want to meet our fun for will be live and virtual.

SPEAKER_130: Love it. I love that.

SPEAKER_20: And honestly, as an environmental play, like not everybody needs to fly everywhere.

Jason Calacanis: So if you give hybrid events and then you can create like an offset program for the people who don't come. I don't know. I just think there's a lot of potential there to prices. It makes a lot of sense. And I, it does seem like in this case, the valuation was bonkers. It seems to have now, at least according to the secondary sales, according to the financial times in February, the Hopin shares fell 41% on a secondary marketplace. Okay.

SPEAKER_24: And from their most recent valuation, that would be a $3.3 billion reduction, which is, doesn't seem unreasonable.

SPEAKER_397: I think that's exactly what we just did back in the envelope. Right. Exactly.

SPEAKER_71: It's like cut it in half. You came up with the same time. Cut it in half. Perfect. Here's the good news. The founder knows what he's doing. Apparently he made the cuts.

SPEAKER_05: He didn't need to. And he's going to have to just put his head down for two years and build into the valuation. He probably can.

SPEAKER_109: I think the issue is going to have, now that he's sitting on 200 milli.

SPEAKER_05: Well, personally, the reason I don't like the $200 million, um, payout for him is,

SPEAKER_381: is he going to come to work for the next two years? You have to wonder. Yeah. Or is he going to hand it off to somebody?

SPEAKER_05: I would say a good rule of thumb is, hey, maybe the founders can cash out up to, uh, 25% of the current revenue of the company. Companies at a hundred million. You could great cash out 25. Yeah. And then also the other employees who've been there for over two years. Now this is a two year old company, so there's nothing to do it. But you know, listen, these, the people who are doing these deals, they went in, they're very sophisticated investors. There's nobody more sophisticated than altimeter, uh, shout out Brad Gerstner. So if Brad was involved in that secondary show, whatever, maybe they did that to win the deal. Maybe it was a hot competitive deal. And I don't like those payoffs when they do it. I'll ask Brad next time I see him what the story is and I'll report back. Um, but you know, it was a hot moment in time. It was a hot deal apparently.

SPEAKER_49: And so people would, um, sometimes basically the most cynical way to look at it is bribe the founder to take their deal. And the more charitable way to look at it is they got to buy more shares in a company they like, and the founder got to benefit from his or her creation.

SPEAKER_05: Uh, and the truth lies somewhere in the middle. Mm hmm.

SPEAKER_76: Um, I don't like tying financing to secondaries. I think that should be split as the best hygiene practice.

SPEAKER_49: Because imagine you're an investor in the company at the $250 million round. Now the company has an offer one offers for $8 billion once for nine. The one with $8 billion comes with $200 for the founder. The one with nine doesn't. Or there's an offer that has more controls, you know, better governance. Well, now the founder is going to pick because of the God King and God Queen nature of how the companies are run now, they're going to pick what's in their best interest or all

SPEAKER_143: shareholders best interest. And so where does that leave the employees? Should the employees be able to cash out too? Yeah.

SPEAKER_76: You know, and so these things are fraught with governance issues and incentive issues. And I think people have to be thoughtful about it, but it's a free market. Mm hmm. So deal with it.

SPEAKER_49: I have to deal with it all the time. It's a free market out there. And I deal with it all the time. And I have conversations with founders. Usually my conversation with founders, if I'm being honest, is, are you taking any chips off the table?

SPEAKER_76: And I've had many founders say, no, I want to buy more. And I'm like, do you own your home? And they're like, no, I rent.

SPEAKER_05: And I'm like, are you independently wealthy with a trust fund? No, my parents weren't rich. My dad was, you know, a lawyer. My mom was a nurse. No, I'm not. And I'm like, okay, perhaps you own $100 million in shares in this company. You own 30% of it's worth 300 million. What do we think about you selling 5 million, 4 million? You pay your taxes and you put a down payment on a house in the,

SPEAKER_44: or you buy a house if you're in Austin, or you put a down payment on a house if you're in the Bay area.

SPEAKER_138: Austin is not that cheap, first of all, but second.

SPEAKER_137: Well, you could buy a million dollars. Trust me. I've been looking every day.

Jason Calacanis: Well, this is what you said in the, in the book, right? There's like, you let them sell. There's an amount that's sort of comfort money. Yes. And then there's an amount that's FU money.

SPEAKER_409: Yeah.

SPEAKER_408: When you get to that, this is, this is, this is beyond FU money.

SPEAKER_411: This is FU, I'm going to go. Everything. Yeah. This is, I'm going to buy Twitter money. Just kidding.

SPEAKER_165: Well, it's, I was about to say, this is, I'm going to go buy a restaurant, a hotel, and an airplane money. Yeah. And I've seen this happen.

SPEAKER_44: Like I've seen founders go buy it, spend like literally three months picking their plane, two months picking their house in Kauai, three months going into some stupid restaurant venture. And then all of a sudden their phone's ringing because their pilots want to raise the,

SPEAKER_49: the plane went on fire in the hangar. The chef quit. There's a lawsuit, uh, with their land. Cause the neighbors, they're building too much. And all of a sudden found a distraction.

SPEAKER_130: Yeah. Trust me. I just bought my first, second home. And like. It's a little much work. I mean, literally, you know, It's complex.

SPEAKER_165: Everything that you dialed in at your primary home, your internet, your TVs,

SPEAKER_49: your insurance, water, you know, whatever. It's just all happens a second time, you know, and you're a homeowner. You understand what you have to go through with your current home nightmare. It's like double the nightmare. Now I know people who've done this, who've got triple the nightmare. All right, listen, this is a great episode. Congratulations to the hop and founder investors. I think you have a real business. Don't worry about the reduction in value of your company. Just put your head down and build the world's greatest product.

SPEAKER_05: And for competitors, uh, you could build a competing product to this. And the roadmap is, you know, flat rate, because I need a flat rate solution. So selfishly, if somebody could build me a flat rate solution for a thousand dollars a year that let me run my conferences on it, I would do it. Uh, or if somebody wants to give me a five year deal for a flat rate on one of these air meter

SPEAKER_153: hop in, uh, for a really cheap price, I'll do a barter with you. So for some ads on the show.

SPEAKER_20: I'm so glad we did this story, by the way, because this is a, I'm just so glad we did this story and we're able to unpack the narrative with math because

SPEAKER_134: yeah, that was easier to do really valuable. Well, it's also really valuable to look at these stories and be like,

SPEAKER_06: It's easier for you to do right now, Molly, because you're on the other side of the table and you see the insides of these businesses, you know, how this stuff works now in month four.

SPEAKER_05: You've, you know, basically in four months, you've got 60% of the knowledge of investing, you know, and then it's basically gonna be.

SPEAKER_423: I'm just working on the math now.

SPEAKER_05: Well, I mean, I think there's a quick rant, like any other skill, like if you want to learn podcasting, you can probably learn 60, 70% in your first year. And then to get the last 30%, you know, it's like, you're gonna learn whatever, 10% the next year,

SPEAKER_126: whatever, 20% the next year, and then 5% the year after that. And then it's just harder to get those last, you know, I hit a half course shot.

SPEAKER_134: It's like the Bugatti.

Jason Calacanis: It takes like 100 horsepower or something to get to 200 to 100 or 150. And then it takes all the rest of the horsepower to get from 100 to 200. Yes, or some crazy thing like that. Yeah.

SPEAKER_46: Yeah, I mean, it's more effort to get the last little things. All right, everybody. It's been an amazing episode. Here's some things you can do to support the show.

SPEAKER_05: Go to youtube.com slash this weekend, hit subscribe, ring the bell, and then we give you get to join us every day here. Number two, you can write a review of the show rated on Spotify or iTunes. Number three, you can thank the sponsors. You can CC at Molly wood at Jason. When you do that, or you, you know, can just go visit their URLs and use their products and support them for supporting us. And if you really want to go next level producers at this week and startups.com. We live in the future segment where we talk about things that are crazy and new in the world or startup of the day, just tip us off. And then if you hear somebody on another podcast, like, you know, there's a lot of boutique podcasts out there and you hear somebody who's a great guest always on the lookout for somebody who is really intelligent, really well spoken. A lot of the great folks, you know, in the industry today started here on this program. Travis, Sokka, Chamath, Keith Raboi, Glenn from Redfin, a lot of them started here on this week in startups 10 years ago, seven years ago, we had them on a couple of times, and then they became just great podcasters themselves like Chamath or regulars on other people's podcasts like Raboi. And they were less known at that time, or totally unknown, in some cases. And so we like to discover those people and then have them on on a regular basis. We like to build those characters, if you will, and those personalities. So if you find somebody like that, please do send them our way.

SPEAKER_427: Anything else you can do to support the show, Molly?

SPEAKER_04: Uh, I mean, keep coming out, keep coming out. Leave us those reviews on iTunes, like help juice those ratings. That helps. But really, just keep talking to us.

Jason Calacanis: It's the best. Like we said, we watch the chat every day, and it basically is like hanging out with our friends. And that's the best part of this job.

SPEAKER_05: It is the best part of the show is the naughty gang 10 AM. Most days Pacific time.

SPEAKER_46: Uh, well, sometimes we can get interrupted by breaking news or whatever, but yeah, that's why you hit the bell, you ring the bell. Exactly.

SPEAKER_432: Because then we have to go live because Elon again, like we did yesterday. And tomorrow we'll play everybody's favorite game show. What should Elon buy next?

SPEAKER_433: I just came up with that idea. Oh my God.

SPEAKER_435: What should Elon and Jeff Bezos buy next on tomorrow's show? We'll see you next time. Bye bye. Thanks producers. Great job producers.

SPEAKER_439: Hey everyone, producer Nick here. I want to tell you about the SaaS syndicate. If you're a founder of a SaaS company with a product and market, our investment team wants to talk to you. Head over to the syndicate.com slash SaaS, S-A-A-S, to apply to raise from the SaaS syndicate. And you can join Jason's syndicate of over 9,000 accredited investors at thesyndicate.com.

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